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The Other Matthiessen
He’s got the same long, patrician face, wavy hair, and, at least in his author photo, the familiar denim button-down. Not unlike a certain Sagaponack nature writer and Zen practitioner. Then, too, his just released debut novel spans “love in the ruins of the Mayan Yucatan” and “landscapes, rivers, and tidal estuaries” of the northeastern U.S., on to “the wayward collision of nature and civilization.”

To look behind the scenes of an event that you’ve come to look forward to, large or small, and find the efforts of one person holding it all together can be surprising. If, that is, it isn’t the new normal in this constrained age. Poetry Pairs at Guild Hall regularly brings top-flight readers here while adding a touch of the literary to that institution’s otherwise varied lineup. Thanks to Fran Castan.

Locals who cursed the presence of New Jerseyites here this summer can take a measure of revenge in the dispatching of the Montclair, N.J., Rugby Club back whence they came Saturday, courtesy of the Montauk Sharks by a 17-14 tally at Herrick Park in East Hampton.
Still, “a 3-point game in rugby is a pretty close game,” the Sharks’ coach, Rich Brierley, said Monday. And Montclair is a team that just moved up to the Empire Union’s Division 2, which, taken together, could signal rough waters ahead.

You don’t have to be some old salt with proud memories of swung fists and splintered pool cues at the Black Buoy to know that Sag Harbor was once a place with roughneck bars, little eateries run by annoyed cranks, a puzzling superfluity of gas stations, and the ragged glory of 19th-century manses fallen into decrepitude.
But here’s a question. Can a house embody the history, the resurrection, of a village? David Bray would say yes. Twice over.

I write in praise of the ugly golf shirt.
Oh, I’ve got a beauty. It’s not loud, no. It would be better if it were loud. It is, rather, a mottled mix of black and gray specks — inexplicably or inadvertently designed by someone in the employ of Bert Pulitzer to look like the ghostly nothingness of an old antenna television after the programming ends and the final bars of the national anthem fade.

Remember when Grandma used to talk about how they did it in the old days, pulling shut all the drapes and leaving them shut when the sun came up and how that kept the house cool all day? Michael Haverland does. The architect not only uses floor-length drapes — two-sided for insulation — in his own house on Cove Hollow Road in East Hampton, he urges them on his clients all the time, he said on a Friday in late July. It’s one example of his belief that simple, practical solutions are best.

Has a writer ever been more productive in death than Kurt Vonnegut? It’s a mini industry, from posthumous collections of his unpublished short fiction (“Look at the Birdie,” “While Mortals Sleep”) to the hefty Library of America volumes of his life’s work, the most recent of which, “Novels & Stories, 1950-1962,” came out in April. In October, Delacorte will release a book of his letters and Vanguard will publish “We Are What We Pretend to Be: First and Last Works.”